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Looking at the Sunday version of the Capital District’s paper, the Times Union, I saw another article on Captial District Community Gardens. My favorite lines in the article are this: “In these inner-city acres, rich and poor, white and black, young and old and people spanning the social, economic and ethnic spectrum mingle and create a community that is something of a surrogate family…’We’ve got lawyers pulling weeds alongside laborers and immigrants. They help each other and form an amazing community. They become families, in essence’.”

Having a garden this year has been one of the best experiences that K and I have ever had together. The amount of hours we’ve put into our garden, the exercise, the pride I feel when I see the fruits and veggies grown from the seeds we planted in the early dark of spring, the dirt on my feet – I love it all. So here’s the article:

Gardens Ripe With Tales of Albany

Urban community plots are a fertile ground for diverse crops and a variety of people

By Paul Grondahl, Staff Writer
First Published in Print: August 23, 2009

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ALBANY — Dressed in his formal chef’s whites, Noah Sheetz, Gov. David Paterson’s executive chef, ambled across Eagle Street from the Executive Mansion and picked his way through the bounty of the community garden that borders Lincoln Park.

From neatly ordered, weed-free rows in a corner plot he tends, Sheetz yanked up a fistful of ruby beets the size of baseballs and sliced off a head of broccoli as wide as his palm.

“This has worked out really well and it’s great to learn from the other gardeners,” said Sheetz, a Culinary Institute of America graduate with solid restaurant credentials.

As Sheetz commiserated about tomato blight and an influx of pesky beetles, gardener Euthia Benson, who grew up in the Deep South, told a story about how her mother taught her to grow tasty okra when she was a young girl.